Turner devotes six pages (98-104) to two Samoan love-stories. One of
them illustrates the devotion of a wife and her husband's ingratitude
and faithlessness, as the following summary will show:
There was a youth called Siati, noted for his singing. A
serenading god came along, threw down a challenge, and
promised him his fair daughter if he was the better singer.
They sang and Siati beat the god. Then he rode on a shark to
the god's home and the shark told him to go to the
bathing-place, where he would find the god's daughters. The
girls had just left the place when Siati arrived, but one of
them had forgotten her comb and came back to get it.
"Siati," said she, "however have you come here?" "I've come
to seek the song-god and get his daughter to wife." "My
father," said she, "is more of a god than man--eat nothing
he hands you, never sit on a high seat lest death should
follow, and now let us unite."
The god did not like his son-in-law and tried various ways
to destroy him, but his wife Puapae always helped him out of
the scrape, one time even making him cut her into two and
throw her into the sea to be eaten by a fish and find a ring
the god had lost and asked him to get. She was afterward
cast ashore with the ring; but Siati had not even kept
awake, and she scolded him for it. To save his life, she
subsequently performed several other miracles, in one of
which her father and sister were drowned in the sea. Then
she said to Siati: "My father and sister are dead, and all
on account of my love to you; you may go now and visit your
family and friends while I remain here, but see that you do
not behave unseemly." He went, visited his friends, and
forgot Puapae. He tried to marry again, but Puapae came and
stood on the other side. The chief called out, "Which is
your wife, Siati?" "The one on the right side." Puapae then
broke silence with, "Ah, Siati, you have forgotten all I did
for you;" and off she went. Siati remembered it all, darted
after her crying, and then fell down dead.
Apart from the amusing "suddenness" of the proposal and the marriage,
this tale is of interest as indicating that among the lower races
woman has--as many observations indicate--a greater capacity for
conjugal attachment than man.
The courtship scene cited above indicates an instinctive knowledge of
the strategic value of coyness and feigned displeasure. The following
story, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner gives
it, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against the
danger and folly of excessive coyness, so inconvenient to the men:
Once there were two sisters, Sinaleuuna and Sinaeteva, who
wished they had a brother. Their wish was gratified; a boy
was born to their parents, but they brought him up apart,
and the sisters never saw him till one day, when he had
grown up, he was sent to them with some food. The girls were
struck with his beauty.
Afterwards they sat down and filled into a bamboo bottle the
liquid shadow of their brother. A report had come to them of
Sina, a Fijian girl who was so beautiful that all the swells
were running after her. Hearing this, and being anxious to
get a wife for their brother, they dressed up and went to
Fiji, intending to tell Sina about their brother. But Sina
was haughty; she slighted the sisters and treated them
shamefully. She had heard of the beauty of the young man,
whose name was Maluafiti ("Shade of Fiji"), and longed for
his coming, but did not know that these were his sisters.
The slighted girls got angry and went to the water when Sina
was taking her bath. From the bottle they threw out on the
water the shadow of their brother. Sina looked at the shadow
and was struck with its beauty. "That is my husband," she
said, "wherever I can find him." She called out to the
villagers for all the handsome young men to come and find
out of whom the figure in the water was the image. But the
shadow was more beautiful than any of these young men and it
wheeled round and round in the water whenever Maluafiti, in
his own land, turned about. All this time the sisters were
weeping and exclaiming:
"Oh, Maluafiti! rise up, it is day;
Your shadow prolongs our ill-treatment.
Maluafiti, come and talk with her face to face,
Instead of that image in the water."
Sina had listened, and now she knew it was the shadow of
Maluafiti. "These are his sisters too," she thought, "and I
have been ill-using them; forgive me, I've done wrong," But
the ladies were angry still. Maluafiti came in his canoe to
court Lady Sina, and also to fetch his sisters. When they
told him of their treatment he flew into an implacable rage.
Sina longed to get him; he was her heart's desire and long
she had waited for him. But Maluafiti frowned and would
return to his island, and off he went with his sisters. Sina
cried and screamed, and determined to follow swimming. The
sisters pleaded to save and to bring her, but Maluafiti
relented not and Sina died in the ocean.